A Posting Handbook For Peace

[bisonbison]

It's been said that SS needed a posting guide, and it became clear that it wasn't writing itself, despite the fervent prayers of whoever. So you'll forgive me if I went and wrote it. Please do your best to confine the discussion in this thread to what I've written and not whether I am your hero or the biggest overhyped jackass on these forums.

Here is, in my opinion, a basic guide to posting on the 2+2 forums, with a particular eye to posting in strategy subforums like Small Stakes or HUSH. This isn't really a 2+2 newbie guide. I don't know exactly how I'd categorize it, except that this is what sprung to mind when I sat down to finally hash this stuff out.

Chapter 1: Where Should I Post This?
2+2 has more than twenty sub-forums, most of them with well-developed personalities, clear functional distinctions and regular reading/posting populations (which, thankfully, overlap across sub-forums).

However dumbfounded new posters may be by this welter of choices, a moment's consideration can ensure that subforums don't get clogged with repetitive or off-topic posts.

The basic rules:
1. Each forum has its own domain of topics.
2. Each forum has a population that wants to keep the noise level low and the signal level high.
3. It is each poster's responsibility to figure out where their post should go.

If you don't know what forum covers what, you can A) Read the descriptions on this page, B) Use the search function to find similar topics, and/or C) Lurk more until such wisdom is revealed to you. When in doubt, search. I know that 2+2's search function is kind of wonky and hard to use, but it does work.

Failure to put forth this basic effort will be met by one or more of the following attitudes: 1) contempt, 2) disdain, 3) pity, and 4) non-interest.

As a tactic of last resort, you can make a post in the Beginners' Forum asking "Where should this go?" Furthermore, if you don't understand the terms used in a post, either respond to thread in question or post about it in Beginners.

If you're met with attitudes 1, 2 or 4 in the Beginners' Forum, rest assured that the responder is being a dick and you are in the right.

The basic idea:

If I am posting about PokerTracker, why not post it in "Books/Software"?
If I'm posting about table selection for hold'em, is it really specific to Micro or SS, or would it be better suited to the General forum?
If I have a question about sample sizes and my win rates, shouldn't it go in the probability or poker theory forums?
If I don't know where to find the converter, why must I make a thread about it? Wasn't I born with my own smidge of divine spark? Doesn't that mean anything to me?

Author's Note: In reality, the forums thrive on a sense of community: helpful, jovial, sarcastic, competitive, and everything else by turns, and there's certainly a place for off-topicness amid the topics, but please label these forays into self-indulgence as such (a simple [off-topic] in the title does the trick) and understand that stretching the bounds of topicality also stretches people's patience, whether or not they voice their concerns. If there's a call to Omaha hi-lo arms in the Small Stakes HE forum, don't create 10 new threads to encompass all the necessary trash talk. Keep it contained in the original thread.


Chapter 2: Titling Your Posts
Posters want responses, so they make catchy, interesting, novel titles. Readers want to know what they'll be reading, so they like precision and some memorable fidelity between what the title says and what the post contains.

These two urges are in conflict, but the outcomes aren't equal. When readers' desires are ascendent, the forum gets a little dry: "T9s in the CO" followed by "JTs in the CO" followed by "JTs on the Button". When posters' desires are ascendent, though, the forums get almost unbrowsable. Random song lyrics. Testimonies to the physical genius of Salma Hayek. Shoutouts to the shorties. Not good, and it causes a dropoff in the serious strategic discussion that keeps the forum going.

Luckily, there's a happy medium. Clarity and interest can coexist if you take ten seconds to think "Will this make any sense to anyone outside of my own head?"

Titles To Be Emulated:
pocket 4s in the SB
AKo in BB vs. EP Raise
KK UTG With Straight/Flush Flop
TP On The River - How is this fold?
Bottom two pair against a LAG.

Titles To Be Avoided:
C'mon!
Could I have saved money here?
Halle Berry and Tyra Banks
Dealt AA twice in a row!
Hero does the flush draw.
Invisible Touch.
Clueless
Help.

Benign Middle Ground:
JTs in MP, turn question - YANKEES SUCK
Pocket 8s miss the flop, Olivia Williams is purty.
Help, I am losing my shirt at Party 3/6.

Chapter 3: Making Good Hand Posts
There are a lot of different types of threads, but the backbone of most of the strategy subforums are discussions of specific hands played live or online.

A good hand post is not one that has been converted to look all pretty and regular. A good hand consists of four things: context, text, a prompt, and not results.

Context
Poker is a complex social game. It is not played in a vacuum and your opponents, though you may hold them in contempt, are not cardboard cutouts sent to shovel you their money. Context is vital to proper play. Context means reads.

If you don't understand that reads can change the play of even the simplest hands, then you're going to be forever shrifted on good advice. That's it.

So tell us what your opponents are like. Qualify as needed, but give us something. "Bob seems tight after two orbits" is a read and is much better than the damning "NO READS".

If you've got nothing to share about your opponents, tell us anything you know about the table: how long you've been there, whether it seems aggro or passive, whether it was a friday night or monday morning, etc, etc, etc. Give us something. Make an effort beyond clicking the post button and hold others to the same standard.

Text
The meat of a hand post is the hand itself. It doesn't need the converter to be a good hand to talk about, but it does need a certain level of detail.

In order to give you decent advice on any reasonably close decision, we're going to need to know the following:

A. your cards (ranks and suits, please)
B. Your position at the table.
C. the board cards for each round (ditto to A)
D. the number of opponents still active for each round
E. The size of the pot.
F. Any betting action that affects D or E.

If it's folded to you in MP, you can just say it's folded to you. If all the active players call, you can just say that everyone called, but if you bet and get two callers on the flop, it's vital to know which two callers. It matters whether it's the CO and the Button or the CO and the BB. So be precise.

A Prompt
The prompt in a hand post is often implied. Post a hand and you're basically asking "Does this look alright?/Did I mess this up?"

However, if you've got a more specific question, don't be shy about shaping the whole post around it. If you're not sure you did the right thing on a given flop, stop the hand text at your last flop action. If you're not sure about a fold, STOP at the fold. Don't taint the interpretation with info you didn't have at the time of the decision. Put us in your baffled shoes.

Not Results
I've written about this at length before, but basically: don't include results. They mess up the discussion.

Conclusion
This is not intended to be the be all and end all of posting guides, but I'm operating on the assumption that it's easier to revise than it is to start anew, and that you guys will realize that this is a good faith effort to start a discussion and not another attempt by me to impose my will on the forums.

So. Let me hear your thoughts.

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]
So. Let me hear your thoughts.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this should be stickied immediately. Wonderful post, good scribe.

[helpmeout]

I think the best posts for the poster and the people responding have a lot of information about why they did such and such.

Eg I didnt bet the flop because I was fearful of my opponents folding. I had a monster hand so I hoped an opponent made a second best hand on the turn where I'd collect larger bets.

"Not just did I play this good". You played it good if your thinking correctly about the situation.

I also hate the stupid catchy titles just to get attention.

[brassnuts]

This is Bison's attempt to completely take over the SS forum. Please disregard.

Nice post.

Edit: "completely take over the SS forum" should be read as follows: "compltely take over the world."

[ddubois]

Not that I disagree with the contents, but I think it's too excessively long and wordy. FAQ-type posts are normally, and should be, much more concise and to the point - after all, you want them to be read as widely as possible. IMHO.

[private joker]

FYI, my Halle Berry & Tyra Banks title wasn't supposed to just be inane and off-topic; I assumed it would be understood that it was dealing with my Q [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] Q [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], and that's more interesting than a post just titled "QQ" or "two black ladies in the pocket" or whatever. But I'll refrain from such references in the future.

[KingSix]

Good Luck...

I think this could apply to almost every message board everywhere on the net. People don't search, don't spell check, blah blah blah and there have been exactly 4,584,222,678,001 people who have attempted something like this before. I've noticed that on almost every board I've ever read they've failed.

I also think that people just post where they think they can get a reply. Many just look at the 6,000 plus posts and post in SS, even if has a bit more to do with Poker Theory (651 posts).

Despite those facts, I applaud the effort, but if you personally aren't going to moderate it, spending hours and hours moving posts and the like, I think it is doomed to fail.

Everyone was new here once. It can be daunting and difficult for newbies to get up the courage to post, and I think that a long list of rules enforced by a cabal of long timers will just make them hesitant to post or sign up and join the community.

Personally, I think a sub-forum should be started for just hands that people want input about. I think that it would be much easier to "enforce" a specific form for "hands that want advice" in their own forum. Let SS be for everything else including the hands people don't want advice on ("funny hands", "crazy hands", etc.)

[img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

King

[bisonbison]

I got what you were getting at, and it doesn't bug me, but I think it bugs other people.

[Carmine]

As a newcomer(but lurker for awhile)I would say it is necessary to sticky this asap. It took me several weeks if not months to pick up on what makes up a good thread here (even though I don't post much)

If we're looking for criticism then I would say it is a bit lengthy. Attention spans dwindle quite quickly for most readers and after a few paragraphs most threads are interpreted as "blah..blah blah..blah.blah". Defeating the whole purpose of such thread.

One area that I feel could be greatly shortened is chapter two. I don't feel the catchy phrases are the worst thing to happen to a forum. At worst you are wasting a few seconds clicking on and quickly off the thread if you're not interested in replying. At best you might get a little chuckle from someone's wit.
Otherwise nice job (place "thumb's up" icon here).

[StellarWind]

[ QUOTE ]
If I don't know where to find the converter, why must I make a thread about it?

[/ QUOTE ]
Add a link to the converter and a couple sentences about what it is for. Since this is my request it would no longer be self-promotion for you to include it [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img].

I strongly prefer one hand per thread. I've stopped reading multihand posts in self-defense. If giving each hand its own thread creates too many threads, you are posting too many hands.

[ QUOTE ]
Here is, in my opinion, a basic guide to posting on the 2+2 forums, with a particular eye to posting in strategy subforums like Small Stakes or HUSH.

[/ QUOTE ]
I think this guide would be more effective if you focused on the specific goal of SS. What is on-topic in this forum? How do we like to see things done? If this works out well you can always do additional guides for HUSH, Micro, etc.

You need to address the inevitable question of what is SS: limit hold'em, ring game play, and appropriate limits.